The DEI Catch-22

When the Trump administration announced that it was canceling $400 million worth of grants to and contracts with Columbia University, ostensibly to punish the university for its handling of anti-Semitism amid pro-Palestinian campus protests, one important detail went unspecified: what type of funding, exactly, would be getting cut. In the weeks since, researchers at the university have found themselves moonlighting as detectives, trying to understand why some of them saw their life’s work upended while others were spared.

They believe they have found a pattern. As far as they can tell, nearly all of the canceled grants seem to have made some mention of diversity, equity, inclusion, or other disfavored topics, several med-school researchers told me.

Making the cuts even more maddening is the fact that, at least until a few months ago, the federal government required researchers to include plans to “enhance diversity” in many grant applications. And under a policy first implemented during the George H. W. Bush administration, the National Institutes of Health long offered supplemental funding for grants that employed someone from an underrepresented minority group. Now the same factors that helped researchers get their grants approved may have become liabilities. “You can imagine how it feels to be terminated for following the government guidelines,” Domenico Accili, an endocrinology professor, told me.

[Rose Horowitch: Colleges have no idea how to comply with Trump’s orders]

Beyond the capriciousness of punishing researchers for following the prior administration’s rules, the grant cancellations demonstrate the impossible position that Columbia’s researchers are in. If they didn’t pursue DEI objectives before, they could have lost out on grants or even violated congressional mandates. If they did, they’re at risk of ending up as collateral damage in the culture war. They’d prefer to just get back to the science.

The cuts have already had significant effects. Because medical-research funding is such a large share of federal support for higher education, Columbia’s med school has borne the brunt of the funding cuts. This makes the punishment seem even more arbitrary—the medical school is several miles away from the campus where the bulk of the pro-Palestinian protests occurred. Columbia’s cancer center has stopped work on several clinical trials for disease treatment and symptom management, Dawn Hershman, an oncologist, told me. Hershman said that, unlike many of her colleagues, she isn’t convinced that there is any DEI-specific pattern to the cuts thus far; even so, her lab has been modifying clinical research to comply with Trump’s anti-DEI directives. “This type of disruption costs money and time—time that people with cancer don’t have,” she said. Accili, who leads the Diabetes and Endocrinology Research Center, had to stop work on a clinical trial that had tracked patients since the 1990s. Because he can’t finish the study, all the data are unusable, he told me.

If the Trump administration is in fact targeting these grants because of ideological factors, it’s caught a lot of apolitical research in the crosshairs. According to an email from the director of the Columbia Stem Cell Initiative to colleagues, grants to train aspiring researchers were canceled because of their diversity component. Grants that mentioned climate, race, HIV, or COVID also appear to have been cut, as were grants that support centers to study cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s.

[Read: Inside the collapse at the NIH]

Megan Sykes, the director of the Columbia Center for Translational Immunology, received supplemental funding to employ a Black graduate student on her research grant. But the grant itself studied better ways to transplant animal organs into humans. One of the grants canceled at Accili’s lab included an effort to recruit transgender patients. But the study itself looked at the progression of bone disease in humans. (Accili told me that, when it came to grants to support early-career scientists, filling out the paperwork related to the NIH’s diversity requirement was sometimes a burden. Some specialties already struggle to recruit enough young physicians; adding new demands, he said, only makes that more difficult.)

One engineering-school professor whose graduate student lost the grant that paid his stipend said that the student didn’t participate in the protests on either side. “It’s so disconnected from anything he does,” the professor, who requested anonymity for fear of more grant cuts, told me. “He’s ending up suffering consequences nominally for how Columbia’s leadership handled the protest.”

Some of the researchers feeling the biggest effects of the punishments are themselves Jewish. Columbia has an unusually high proportion of Jewish students and professors. (The Jewish campus organization Hillel estimates that Columbia’s grad-student population is 16 percent Jewish.) Many are seeing their livelihood thrown into question in the name of fighting anti-Semitism. They’re aware of the irony. Sykes, who’s Jewish, told me that she’s frightened by the rise of anti-Semitism. “But I just don’t understand the connection between that and NIH-funded biomedical research,” she said.

Last week, Trump’s anti-Semitism task force told Columbia that it would consider restoring the $400 million if the university takes a number of specific steps to crack down on pro-Palestinian protesters and address anti-Semitism, including changing its discipline policies and banning masks that protesters use to conceal their identities. But even if the money comes back, things won’t return to the way they were before. Now that Trump has set the precedent of pulling scientific funding as a punishment for unrelated offenses, scientific research will always be at risk of being caught in the middle. Prior administrations, including Joe Biden’s, have used university funding as a way to further certain priorities. But Trump’s is the first to wield the threat of lost federal funding as a political cudgel. If obeying the dictates of one administration places scientists at risk of being persecuted by the next, what are they to do?

Accili has warned faculty members not to use any terms related to diversity, equity, and inclusion in future grant proposals. He has even advised them to avoid technical phrases, such as “gain of function,” that have become associated with pandemic-related controversies. “We’re in a phase in which we have to watch what we write or what we say for fear of offending the ongoing political sensitivities,” he told me. That has never been an ideal condition for scientific progress.